The New Liberal Initiative

…or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Reforming the Party

First of all, wow, that election was like a kick in the teeth. Can’t really say much more than the recent iterations of the Liberal Party was rejected to an extent that under different circumstances caused the collaspe of the PC party in 1993. Truth be told the party is lucky it didn’t suffer the same fate.

All that being said, and said, by many over the past weeks since the election results, the time has come to think about how to actually start rebuilding the party. I am not talking about the oddity of a special online convention, or the craziness of the top down reform some are proposing (which has failed in the past: the work of the Change Commission of 2009, and the work of the Red Ribbon Task Force of 2006). While ideas are always welcome, what has failed in the old proposals, and will fail in new proposals is not that they are too radical, but that they are not radical enough.

Take for example the role of commissions. The Red Ribbon Task Force Report proposed that commissions could be eliminated when a goal was acheived of sufficient representation of the constituent group. While at the time I was wholely opposed to such a move, the report missed a fundamental fact: why do we need commissions, and why are members of commissions some of the most engaged liberals?

The answer is pretty easy, that outside of commissions, there was little avenue for engagement. The party slowly ossified, became sclerotic to use two terms I have heard used except for the commissions (and I can only speak about the youth commission to be honest). So is the solution to eliminate commissions and remove some of the last remaining avenues for engagement within the party, or to open up the party and make it more responsive so that different groups within the party do not need specifically constitutionally based representation anymore.

So I have a couple of small, and one large idea on how to change the party to solve the problem. by no means are they the only ideas I have, or are they perfect, but I think they are a starting point.
 

1) Allow spontaneous advocacy, issue, and other group formation with elements of party membership, access to formal fundraising channels, and similar things.

 
The well off have the Laurier Club, Youth, Women, Seniors and Aboriginals have the commissions. But what do other groups have? It could be anything from a small group of lawyers that meet to talk politics once a month, new college grads, Young Liberal Professionals newly out of the Young Liberals, people pushing a policy position, or any other group. Right now it is pretty impossible to raise money for the party as an independent agent, or submit policy. By creating an online infrastructure that allows one to create a group with a method of raising money, and plugging into the party, groups could spontaneously organize and form powerful issue and fundraising blocks with real clout. Want a LGBTQ ‘commission’? Why not just form it yourself.

In this environment you could get rid of formal commissions if you had a method of recognition of groups into the control structure of the party. Whether that is formalized or not (perhaps a system such as club certification, with a higher level of recognition with a higher level of membership) is less important than having systems in place to ease the creation of such organizations.

We started going down this road before with the ’1 week, 100 dinners’ initiative in 2007, but the logistics led to not much money being raised as to keep administration down they were limited to ‘pass the hat’ donations of $20 or less, plus the cost of the event. The difficulty and low reward led to the quick death of the nascent effort. If we are going to try again, there needs to be an easy way for a group only loosely affiliated with the Liberal Party to raise money on the party’s behalf, while being reimbursed for expenses. Legally there is little issue – logistically I’d bet an iPhone programer could get something working reasonably easily.
 

2) Make the Liberal Party a Pryamid, not a myriad of interacting flat organizations.

 
Right now almost every elected position in the party is voted on by its constituent base membership (except for regional chairs on provincial boards for the most part). This has the perverse effect of removing much democratic responsibility from most elected roles, while inflating the egos of the people who hold the roles as representative of their voters and or members. (I know when I held roles in the party I likely would have conducted myself differently if I could have been fired!). The current system makes it incredibly expensive to run for national office, potentially limiting candidates for the position from all the possible good members that may like to run.

So what is the solution of too much direct democracy leading to little accountability? Changing the structure to improve accountability while retaining core democratic elements at each level of the party pryamid.

The change in the party would at the core be this: each level of the party is not elected by the members, but by the level of the party below them. Riding presidents where possible would not be elected by members, but by regional captains (in charge of perhaps 10 polls in a riding) which would make up a riding board. The same would be true for executives at levels further up the party chain, with large provinces having regional executives, then a provincial executive drawn from the regional executive, and so on until the national executive.

This change would not only drastically reduce the expense of running for President of the wider party, but would also assure that all executive members of the Party were grounded as either poll captains or maybe leaders of reasonably large ‘spontaneous commission clubs’. When one moved up the chain, an active party member would be elected to fill the role vacated as one was elected upwards. Just as legitimacy flows upwards through the pryamid, it is logcial that each level could also recall its representative upwards if they lost confidence of their constituent body.
 

Conclusion

 
While by no means do I believe in the supremacy of some of my solutions to the parties ills, I do believe greater discussion on core elements like filling party offices, and what the party’s mission is should be the focus of wide ranging discussion. Without a solid foundation, it is hard to build. As we have seen in the past, formalized efforts through existing party heirarchy has not enabled the party to meet today’s challenges, despite large transformations in the party structure since 2006. Transforming the base of the party into a welcoming and powerful place for member engagement is the start of any transformation.

This article was originally posted on KyleOlsen.com.